Andy Warhol Re-Visits “Electric Chair” in 1971

In 1963 Andy Warhol went through a self-professed “death and disaster” period. It was during this period we first saw “Electric chair.” The image of an electric chair alone fused with Warhol’s keen sense of color and imagery stood out in Warhol’s Original 1963 death and disaster series.

Not co-incidentally sing, sing prison performed its last execution in 1963. Warhol’s work was always influenced by the media of the age, and in 1963 in the middle of the “flower” era, capital punishment was a hot topic.

The image that was originally used was a newspaper photograph.

The 1963 image was screen painted to canvass a sign of Warhol’s earlier work. The 1970 series featured here is screen printed on paper.

It seems clear Warhol was making a statement in the 1960’s when he included the electric chair in his “death and disaster” series. His timing for the re-release nearly a decade later and featuring just this one image as a series as opposed to re-visiting the entire death and disaster series remains one of the many mysteries surrounding Warhol’s work and his frame of mind.

It is a fact that Warhol’s work featured icons related to death more frequently after his assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas in 1968.